Desktop tool overview

The Contensis Desktop Tool allows you to interact with your Contensis instance from your desktop environment. The Desktop Tool is available for all supported versions of Contensis and can be installed on Microsoft Windows 7 and above. The Contensis Desktop Tool can be downloaded from your client area on ZenHub. The tool has four main functions, each of which are explained below.

Note: For the Desktop Tool to be able to work, any firewall software must be configured to let the traffic through. Ports 21, 80 and 443 will need to be configured to allow remote connections.

Live feed

The live feed mirrors the live feed found on the Contensis dashboard. Alongside being able to bring up the live feed at any point, the tool will also bring up a notification in the top right corner of the screen each time a new event is added to the feed.

Reports

Right clicking on the system tray icon will bring up a menu displaying a number of items. This menu includes links to a live version of the site, a link to bring up reports and a multitude of other links such as Content checked out to me.There are also links to change preferences, for help, and to exit the application.

WebDAV

This feature is licensed, please contact your Contensis account manager for more information.

Web distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV) allows you to access your Contensis instance as a virtual disk drive on your computer. This will show up among your internal hard drives and allow you to interact with Contensis as you would any regular set of files and folders. All permissions are carried over to the WebDAV drive, so if you can edit it in Contensis you can edit it within this virtual drive.

Developer Tools

The developer tools are accessed through the desktop tool and cover the following:

Download website files

Allows you to download the website files required for developing controls and Razor views in just one click.

Deploy bespoke controls

You can upload bespoke controls automatically when they are finished for testing.

Automatic Visual Studio solution generation

Creating solutions is done automatically once you have specified which server you want to develop against.

Easy debugging of Razor Views

You can debug your Razor views directly within Visual Studio and then when happy, you can upload them into Contensis via WebDAV.

Manage multiple development configurations

If you work on multiple projects you can easily switch between them quickly.

Note: You will need assign additional permissions (add to the Developer user group) in Contensis for users to be able to use the developer tools in the Desktop Tool.